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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

GameDoc: On the fly Javascript game modding for the mobile web

I had a crazy idea and wanted to create a quick experiment to test it out. Mobile browsers are becoming good - Javascript and Canvas implementation are becoming faster. There are certain advantages to the mobile browsers as a game distribution platform - the most important of which is that it is open and not controlled by arbitrary rules set by Apple, Google or whomever (Classic example - Phone Story). HTML5 games in general are picking up steam but game makers are ignoring the mobile browser.

There are two factors why games on mobile browsers don't work well -

Game developers ignore things like centering the screen on the game area, setting the right zoom level, allowing for touch input(or any alternate mechanism like accelerometer) when there is no keyboard

Browser makers don't provide a good way to do certain things - locking screen orientation, a working audio API etc.

1) is definitely solvable while 2) involves letting platform creators know about the issues faced by game developers (Some influential developers that are already trying to do that - http://www.phoboslab.org/log/javascript). Maybe newer platforms like Mozilla OS will push the standards higher on the existing ones.

So the crazy idea is centered around the concept that HTML5 games being based on open standards should be modifiable by anyone (An idea floating around in Mozilla land) - In this specific case modified to work well on mobile browsers. If a game developer didn't take care to make the game work well on mobile browsers, anyone should be able to fix it.

To prove this point I created a proof of concept - which I called "GameDoc". For the experiment I took the game emptyblack.com. I really liked the game when I played it on the desktop and I wanted to play it on my phone. The game seems to run ok as far as the graphics is concerned but it had the classic issues mentioned in 1). Since there is no keyboard input in the phone the game is unplayable.

GameDoc is a native mobile App that basically wraps a browser WebView. It loads the game from the original URL but it sets the required zoom level on the WebView to get a good view of the game area and locks the screen orientation to landscape. And here is the cool part - It fixes the absence of keyboard by injecting Javascript snippet into the page that adds on-screen controls. When these controla are pressed keyboard events are simulated using the dispatchEvent mechanism. I used the WebView wrapper route to be able to do this Javascript injection on the device (due to absence of browser extensions on the mobile).

So here is the video of how the converted game works. The video shows how the game is not playable in it's original form in the mobile Chrome browser and how the fixed version works with simulated onscreen controls. It's not perfect - Sometimes keyup/keydown events seem to get missed and I think it might be due to multitouch issues. As you can see I really threw this together rather quickly with horrible looking icons for the controls - But you get the idea.

The grand idea is that there can be a crowd sourced HTML5 game portal where people can add their own customization to the game controls or the game itself and the Gamedoc App(or whatever better name I come up with) would pull that extra information for the game and does the necessary modding.

Can I avoid the need to have a separate App that wraps the WebView and just use the native browser? Maybe I can do something at the server side but that might screw up with things that are tied to the original domain like cookies or the local store. Maybe I can just do the controls with some sort of IME trickery.

Anyway as I said it's a crazy experiment. At the least I hope to push HTML5 game developers to think more about the mobile web.

Let me know of your thoughts/comments.

Update: Looks like IOS6 has better support for Audio opening up better game support! And the awesome folks who make Construct2 already support it - https://www.scirra.com/blog/98/the-web-as-the-platform

2 comments:

Hi,Here is another pure JavaScript game, a Trivia game questions http://coursesweb.net/javascript/trivia-game-script_s2 It is made only with javascript, and can be easily added into websites, with the quizes /questions you want. It works on mobile too.